The Hopper center of CES 'Best of' drama

Dish Network will add the Netflix app to its Hopper set-top boxes released in February 2013,

Dish Network will add the Netflix app to its Hopper set-top boxes released in February 2013,

Photo: David Becker / Getty Images

Photo: David Becker / Getty Images

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Dish Network will add the Netflix app to its Hopper set-top boxes released in February 2013,

Dish Network will add the Netflix app to its Hopper set-top boxes released in February 2013,

Photo: David Becker / Getty Images

The Hopper center of CES 'Best of' drama

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Most of the news coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show this week was pretty friendly and gadgety. But Thursday managed to provide a little uproar.

It went like this: The tech reviewers at Cnet nominated the Hopper, a TV streaming device, for a Best of CES award. But shortly after, Cnet's corporate boss, CBS, made them pull it. CBS and Dish, maker of the Hopper, you see, are embroiled in a lawsuit.

The CBS brass also told the Cnet reviewers they should not be reviewing any Dish products for the interim.

Yes, high drama.

The tech news website BuzzFeed called this conflict of interest between writers and the corporate bosses "every tech journalist's worst nightmare."

Conceptually, that is accurate. No journalist, in any field, wants to be told not to write about something because it would be bad for business.

But I can tell you, personally, that not being able to praise some giant company for its latest and greatest product has never robbed me of a wink. It's not as if CBS snuffed a story about insider trading or harmful defects. Its lawyers basically said: "Don't high-five our enemy."

The meaningless kerfuffle sheds a little light on the dirty circle of life between reviewers and the companies they cover. Tech companies and their PR arms decide who gets access to early versions of their products. It is not a coincidence that those writing the nicest reviews about Apple products, for instance, tend to be the ones with the earliest and most comprehensive reviews of Apple products.

And that's the bigger point here: Maybe the tech press shouldn't be lavishing awards on the companies they cover at all. A blurry line runs between a "review" and an "award," but why not report your views on a new product - and leave it at that.

E-mail Zuck? $100: On Friday reports bubbled up that Facebook users were being asked to pay to send a message to someone they did not know on the social network.

The idea: If you want to contact someone you are not "friends" with about, say, a business deal, Facebook would charge you a dollar, and make some money off brokering that transaction. But social media news site Mashable reported being asked to pay $100 to contact Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook actually announced it would start testing a pay e-mail feature back in December, but this appears to be one of the first times it has shown up in the product.

"The test is designed to address situations where neither social nor algorithmic signals are sufficient," read a statement from the company. In other words, they're testing on actual users and monitoring their behavior and buying decisions because they can't judge what people will pay just from analyzing user data.

Facebook also said that the experiment is being done to see how it can better manage users' junk mail - "We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam" - and promised more experiments in the coming months. (Maybe you'll be able to pay to not receive unknown e-mails.)

The company is constantly looking to diversify revenue streams. Today it relies on advertising and taking a cut from apps built atop the platform. Though back-of-the-napkin math indicates paying to e-mail wouldn't add up to a huge cash influx, the social network appears willing to try creative avenues.

There would seem to be a few obvious problems with trying to make someone pay to contact someone else via the Internet. First, if I had a choice between paying $100 (or $1) and Googling around to find someone's e-mail address, I'm taking the latter course.

And even if my employer was picking up the tab (if I'm trying to initiate a deal), few people outside of Silicon Valley are starting business discussions on their Facebook accounts. Maybe fans would be willing to pay to write their favorite celebrity, but unless Facebook shares the revenue, those celebs might balk at the idea of their fans paying to talk to them.

If anything, it would seem fairer if the sender was charged only if the recipient reads or replies to the e-mail. We all get e-mail we never look at.

In Facebook's test, the unsolicited e-mails are very limited in number, to keep the noise down. But if anyone - even for a cost - can write to users' Facebook inboxes, the company will have to be very careful it doesn't numb people to their inbox's usefulness.